Habitus across two fields: Making sense of blurred work-life practice in hospitality and volunteering

Abstract

Research into work, employment and society has often used Bourdieu’s (1990; 1992; 2014) work to explore organisational phenomena, particularly employee and management practice and the application of capital. This paper suggests that such analyses would be enriched by taking broader approaches to stakeholders. In particular, investigates the often blurred line between work and non-work practice, through a habitus lens. Habitus can be distinguished from simpler habit by its ‘generative’ nature (Bourdieu, 2014, p.240), representing embodied practice that generates (even regenerates), as well as simply reinforcing, social structures. The idea of social reproduction strategies (2014, p.240) suggest a sort of sociological natural selection, where the fittest practice is more likely to survive and evolve. The paper considers habitus’ potential contribution to the analysis of triadic employer-employee-customer relationships, adding the complexity of a fourth stakeholder – the volunteer. It does this by observing the structuring of practice within work and leisure spaces and the social capital derived from and exercised during participants’ interaction there. The paper draws on two ethnographies in different, yet strangely similar, contexts–UK public houses (pubs) and conservation volunteering in Australia. The pub study involved two phases of fieldwork in English village pubs over six years and the volunteering study was conducted over three years within one Australian NGO. Within these two fields the interactions and practice(s) of diverse individuals/groups present a view of sociological relations that offers insight into the wider societies where they live and work. The pub is seen as a social institution where social relations are structured and reinforced by intersubjective habitus, with study participants recounting the socialising importance of a first job in the local pub or sampling an illicit first beer under the gaze of paternally strict publicans or established customers, tentatively feeling their adolescent way in the adult game. From a different perspective, conservation practice was seen by employees and volunteers as offering alternative practice when reflecting on broader, habitus laden lifestyles away from the symbolic and literal field of environmentally oriented activity. In both cases, it becomes clear that social norms and habitus are difficult to break, but can be challenged, or at least played with by competent actors who have developed an effective ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu, 1990, p.66), beyond superficial knowledge of the game’s explicit rules – often apparently in resistance to more overt governmental or managerialist attempts to change those rules in the name of socioeconomic progress. This resonates with Bourdieu’s frustration with what he saw as a common Anglo misreading of his work as narrowly determinist, rather than recognising that ‘habitus generates inventions and improvisations but within limits’ (Bourdieu, 2002, p.32). As well as using habitus to better understand practice observed during the two ethnographies, the paper also considers these limits, also exploring how powerful groups (management and government) seek to manipulate those limits. Participants’ habitus often hints at a personal probing of social boundaries within both fields, whether over the long-term (pub worker, regular customer, loyal volunteer) or the short (occasional customer, one-time volunteer).